Siblings II, 2022

The work Siblings is a triptych that has three separate parts that together are a one piece.

This text is from the catalog available to the visitors of the exhibition and part of the artwork. The resemblance is uncanny. We have our mother’s eyes and our father’s jaw. I have heard many people say that me and my siblings are cut from the same cloth. We have inherited the corners of our eyes and our cheekbones from our father’s mother, while our mother’s father is responsible for the shape of our shoulders. Two of us have been cursed with the same pale skin type that so many Finnish families have suffered from for generations. It never gets tanned, and will become scorched even in the middle of winter. The shape of our earlobes also run in the family. Indeed, we commonly joke about these “family earlobes” at family gatherings. Family and its internal relationships are often addressed through heredity and biology. Blood is thicker than water. Family relations should last forever, no matter what. The noses inherited and the identically slanted ankles should be the cement that binds mutual relationships together from now to eternity. But what if all this is taken away from us? What will be left if we cannot see ourselves in others? What do our family relations and our experiences of the family bond consist of? Who has the right to define the nature of our relationships? The descriptions at the beginning of this text have nothing to do with us. The three of us are not biologically related. We are siblings. In my work I contemplate the ideas of siblinghood and family through my unusual family background where there are no biological ties. Adoption, foster care, in vitro fertilization, chosen family etc. These are just a few ways to form a family, and yet we so easily try to form the connections only through resemblance and biology. What kind of a power does a photograph have as a document, if in the end we just see things that we want to see or things that we search from them. Is it only a mirror for our expectations and projections rather than an image that holds some kind of truth?